As the gun debate heats up, one idea seems particularly suited for Connecticut to consider: liability insurance for gun owners.
This is the kind of mandatory insurance you have to get to drive a car — and the kind of protection that costs more if you want to take what the industry knows is a calculated risk. Letting your teenager get behind the wheel is a good example.
When I wanted my son to drive the family cars, my insurance agent offered a market-based solution: pay for the risk and he could drive. Nobody said my son couldn’t drive — but I had to acknowledge the extreme danger that comes with a teenage boy in the driver’s seat. We know this because of extensive research on teenagers and driving by the insurance industry.
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6 Responses to Gun Control Through Liability Insurance?
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If its no fault with statutory limits
for loss of life or limb. Otherwise the lawyers will drive the cost so high it will conflict with the second and be over turned. Given that most homicides are with illegal guns its likely to have little positive change on street crime or suicides (largely legal handguns with single bullets).
Then there’s the moral hazard of paying beneficiaries of gun violence policies in urban crime. A whole new set of motives when life can be bought cheap.
Good point, but I would change the word “hazard”.
Hazards typically involve a potential problem that might not occur.
Insurance fraud based on gun play in urban settings would absolutely occur.
This is just another way of creating another financial levy around the 2nd so that law abiding citizens will say, “Screw it, I give up.” This is what the left wants.
These same filth mongers are silent on the MILLIONS of illegal immigrants here. Many of which are involved in numerous illegal activities that include drugs,guns,prostitution,and human trafficking. From these illegal activities,countless innocent lives have been slaughtered. Many from illegals just being here and not involved in any of the previously mentioned crimes or similar activities.Just the fact that they’re here illegally. What part of “illegal” do you leftists not understand? It must be the part that only suits your needs best: i.e. 2nd Amendment.
Horrible idea of course. Designed by lawyers to keep business coming. Why not require everyone in the state to keep blanket personal liability insurance? Then we could sue each other all the time for anything bad that happens and insurance companies would payout. Haha, this is the Constitution state… really?
What happens when people report their gun was stolen right before they actually sell it on the black market to a criminal? What happens when criminals just don’t insure their gun, like a huge percentage of motorists fail to insure their car. Are you going to sue the uninsured criminal gun owner who has no assets and lives off the State, what they can steal, or what they earn slinging drugs? Or are you going to force non gun owners to buy uninsured gun owner insurance in case they are victims of a gun crime committed by an uninsured gun owner?
Here is a wild idea: Instead of trying to restrict the rights of mentally sound law abiding citizens, you stiffen punishment for criminals?
How about if you commit a crime while in possession of a gun, you go to jail forever with no possibility of parole? How about if you are found to be insane, you are sentenced to a psychiatric institution for life, with no hope for release?
Lund’s comments about restricting the rights of law abiding citizens when criminals don’t follow laws anyway was the only worthwhile part of this column. Congratulations for including that statement. It gives you the illusion of objectivity.